Month: January 2016

Its been months since my last post– PRE-Star Wars! The last post was about the upcoming film, now ancient history in the grand scheme of things. I wrote a post about what I thought of the film and I will probably release that in the next week now that most everyone has seen the film that wants to.

It has been a crazy couple of months for our little family– we went through some transition and popped out on the other side and we appear to be safe from any kind of choas for the time being. In November, I was laid off from my contract job at AT&T, where I had worked as a Senior Project Manager for over two and half years. 2015 was a total mess in my org and it wasn’t a total shocker that I had been laid off– the writing had been on the wall for months and my boss did a good job of trying to promote our value in the ecosystem, but he also encouraged me to find something more stable. Then, while he was on vacation, the bomb hit– on Halloween, no less. I was dressed as Donald Trump, so I kind of deserved it.

Luckily, I was far enough along in the interview process and I landed a nice career kind of job here with CDW. I started the week following Christmas, so almost a month ago. So in total, I was out of work about 6 weeks, but to be out around the holidays is tough going. I think it shows the overall character of a company–some say that AT&T is just too big and makes “mistakes” like that all the time– nothing personal– but that almost makes it more personal.

Lili was also moving on in her career path– we went from both contracting for major IT companies to full time roles. We went from fighting for our days off to 3 weeks vacation and a week of sick time. It feels nice to be out of the contracting rut– but I can’t help but shake that overall nervousness from spending the last couple of years always on the brink of not having a job from week to week– even though it was one of the most stable contract gigs you can land, when you have a family that relays on your income, its a fairly stressful thing to endure for a couple of years. We both were very tired of not being able to take time off without losing a boat load of cash or take sick time and have to make it up– and I think it will take some time to get used to the fact that we are now appreciated for our efforts a little more.

The new job is great– its taken about 10 years of working different tasks in the PM space to finally land into something where I am doing what I want to do in my career. I feel pretty lucky to land at a company that takes pride on making sure its employees are happy and well. I also like the way that the company does business– its not just chasing the next opportunity, but its in it for the long run and it wants to make sure that you are trained well and are happy– and that is huge to me— I have had some many jobs in the last decade where you just get thrown at the problem at hand– no time to train and mentor…. just BOOM– here solve this and when that is done, maybe we have something else for you, maybe not.

So it goes. I know, it’s just work– but work is something that we all do so much of in our lives that is really is important to land somewhere that actually respects your time there and that they want to help you achieve the best that you can possibly do. At the same time, I appreciate everything I have learned to get to this place in my career and I think that is why I will stay here for a long time to come– I have earned my spot at the top of the mountain– and there might be bigger mountains yet to climb, but for now, I will enjoy the view from this summit.